THE DICTATION OF THE COAL FIELDS.
The Vanderbilt and Morgan interest at once increased the price of anthracite coal, adding to it $1.25 to $1.35 a ton. In 1900 they appeared in the open with a new and gigantic plan of consolidation by which they were able to control almost absolutely the production and prices. That the Vanderbilt family and the Morgan interests were the main parties to this combination was well established. [Footnote: Final Report of the U. S. Industrial Commission, 1902, xix: 462-463.] Already high, a still heavier increase of price at once was put on the 40,000,000 tons of anthracite then produced, and the price was successively raised until consumers were taxed seven times the cost of production and transportation.
The population was completely at the mercy of a few magnates; each year, as the winter drew on, the Coal Trust increased its price. In the needs and suffering of millions of people it found a ready means of laying on fresher and heavier tribute. By the mandate of the Coal Trust, housekeepers were taxed $70,000,000 in extra impositions a year, in addition to the $40,000,000 annually extorted by the exorbitant prices of previous years. At a stroke the magnates were able to confiscate by successive grabs the labor of the people of the United States at will. Neither was there any redress; for those same magnates controlled all of the ramifications of Government.
What, however, of the workers in the mines? While the combination was high-handedly forcing the consumer to pay enormous prices, how was it acting toward them? The question is almost superfluous. The railroads made little concealment of their hostility to the trades unions, and refused to grant reforms or concessions. Consequently a strike was declared in 1900 by which the mine workers obtained a ten per cent increase in wages and the promise of semi-monthly wages in cash. But they had not resumed work before they discovered the hollowness of these concessions. Two years of futile application for better conditions passed, and then, in 1902, 150,000 men and boys went on strike. This strike lasted one hundred and sixty-three days. The magnates were generally regarded as arrogant and defiant; they contended that they had nothing to arbitrate; [Footnote: It was on this occasion that George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, in scoring the public sympathy for the strikers, justified the attitude of the railroads in his celebrated utterance in which he spoke "of the Christian men and women to whom God in His infinite wisdom has intrusted the property interests of the country," which alleged divine sanction he was never able to prove.] and only yielded to an arbitration board when President Roosevelt threatened them with the full punitive force of Government action.
By the decision of this board the miners secured an increase of wages (which was assessed on the consumer in the form of higher prices) and several minor concessions. Yet at best, their lot is excessively hard. Writing a few years later, Dr. Peter Roberts, who, if anything, is not partial to the working class, stated that the wages of the contract miners were (in 1907) about $600 a year, while adults in other classes of mine workers, who formed more than sixty per cent, of the labor forces, did not receive an annual wage of $450. Yet Roberts quotes the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics as saying that "a family of five persons requires $754 a year to live on." The average number in the family of a mine worker is five or six. "This small income," Roberts observes, "drives many of our people to live in cheap and rickety houses, where the sense of shame and decency is blunted in early youth, and where men cannot find such home comforts as will counteract the attractions of the saloon." Hundreds of company houses, according to Roberts, are unfit for habitation, and "in the houses of mine employees, of all nationalities, is an appalling infant mortality." [Footnote: "The Anthracite Coal Communities": 346-347.]